Faculty & Staff

Cara Carr

Cara W. Carr (Carolyn Wheeler Carr), emeritus faculty, returns to Reed College campus for the 2014 spring semester as costume designer for Julius Caesar, directed by Kathleen Worley, and as mentor to costume design students in Theatre 162. Cara was faculty/resident costume designer in the Reed Theatre Department for over 25 years where she designed and constructed costumes for over a hundred theatrical productions and taught classes in Costume History and Design, Pattern Drafting, Costume Construction, and Stage Make‐Up and Masks. Cara has been involved in costume design work in the Portland area colleges, theatres, dance and opera companies since 1975. Since her retirement from Reed her costume career has taken her to: Portland Center Stage, draper for period shows Act a Lady and The Imaginary Invalid; Portland Opera Co., costume design and construction for POGO productions of The Magic Flute and The Elixir of Love and for the chamber opera The Rape of Lucrecia; University of Portland, costume designer and head of construction for Sweet Charity, as well as instructor of Make‐Up and Masks; The Portland Art Institute, instructor of Costume Construction. She also spent five years at Lewis and Clark College where she created and established the current theatre costume shop supervisor position and designed costumes for Urine Town, The Musical.

Cara has exhibited her costume design work at the Latimer Quilt and Textile Center, Tillamook, OR and in Vollum Lounge, Reed College. The exhibit featured thirteen selected costumes from three very different eighteenth century based productions. Currently Cara volunteers with the Tillamook County Quilt Trail as a painter of large quilt blocks placed on barns and businesses. She also volunteers as a mentor of a restoration project in the Tryon Creek Watershed, organizing and working with volunteer groups to replace invasive weeds with native plants on an acre of forest in SW Portland.

Cara earned a BFA from the University of Utah and danced professionally with Utah Civic Ballet/Ballet West before earning an MA in Costume History and Design from Idaho State University.